Laser gyroscope random walk determination using a fast filtering technique

In order to reduce the effect of quantization error on gyro test data, Litton has developed a high speed filter which outputs half second accumulated data samples. The quantization noise power in these samples is reduced by a factor greater than 512 while the random walk characteristics are virtually unaffected. High precision measurements of a gyro's random walk coefficient may therefore be obtained from a small data set. The operation of this fast filtering technique, is described, and its effect on gyro test data is analyzed, and laser gyro test results are presented which demonstrate the technique.